The Science of Ufos - Hardcover

Alschuler, William R.; Zimmerman, Howard

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0312262256 ISBN 13: 9780312262259

Verlag: St Martins Pr, 2001

Inhaltsangabe

In an objective scientific analysis, an astronomer speculates on the possiblitiy of UFOs and discusses the technology and theoretical principles required to make them possible. 20,000 first printing.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

William R. Alschuler has a Ph.D. in Astronomy from the University of California at Santa Cruz, and extensive college teaching experience in the sciences, holography, Lippmann photography, energy conservation, and solar building design. He is founder and principal of Future Museums, a consulting firm specializing in the design of exhibits and museums with a science or technology content. He has recently served as a consultant to the California Science Center and the Getty Education Institute for curriculum development that combines art and science. He has been author or editor on the following: The Microverse, UFOs and Aliens, First Contact, The Ultimate Dinosaur, and, most recently, Are We Alone in the Cosmos? He is currently a science professor at California Institute of the Arts and lives with his family in San Francisco.

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Science of UFOs

1

EXAMINING THE EVIDENCE

In early December 1998 thousands of people in Jalisco and Aguascalliente States, about 275 miles west of Mexico City, saw "a very bright white light"fly over the Sierra Madre mountains at about 7P.M.

On November 18, 1998 a man in Crosslanes, West Virginia was going into his garage when he happened to look up and spotted a 727 flying overhead: "It was high up enough it left a very clear contrail. Suddenly, at very close range above the plane, a silver-gray disc appeared. It flew directly over the top of the plane and was making a side-to-side swaying motion, almost like a leaf falling. As it moved the Sun glinted off it, and it shone very brightly. Suddenly from the east, a jet (delta shape) came screaming toward the UFO. At that point it had stopped, and the passenger plane had already moved away.

"The UFO glowed very brightly and then shot straight up and was out of sight in seconds. I have an Air Force Intelligence background and what I saw is nothing I am familiar with."

(Reported in UFO Magazine, March/April, 1999.)

In Zanesville, Ohio, a small town not far from the infamous Wright-Patterson Air Force Base of Roswell crash fame, on November 13, 1966, Ralph Ditter took two photographs of a UFO. They show asuburban scene with a house and driveway, several parked cars, a bare tree in the foreground and woods behind. It seems to have been a bright day as there are strong shadows. In each photo there is a mechanical looking object hovering over the landscape. Its shape is like that of a top hat whose top has been cut off about a third of the way up. It glints in the sunlight. It casts no shadow. The craft matches descriptions of a number of 1998 sightings made around Zanesville, of which at least two were made by law enforcement officers. The photos have no negatives as they were made with a Polaroid camera. The ships are seen in silhouette against a bright cloudless sky so there is no easy way to estimate their size or distance. They remain unexplained to this day.

(Reported in Popular Mechanics, July 1998)

COSMIC PRECIOUS GEMS SCATTERED ON THE ROAD: WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO HAVE EVIDENCE OF UNUSUAL EVENTS?

Many of the people whose memories of being kidnapped by aliens are recounted in the book Abduction, by Harvard psychologist John Mack, report being taken aboard alien ships and examined with metal instruments in rooms lit from all surfaces. They also recall aliens of varied descriptions, as if of distinct species. Certain details of these accounts are remarkably similar to each other, and the aliens' reported behavior makes these experiences sometimes shockingly invasive of the abductees' personal space, physical bodies, and sense of sanity.

 

The above examples of extraordinary events fall into three major categories of what might be called "alien contact." The first are accounts of lights or colors or indistinct shapes in the sky that travel at unbelievable speeds, accelerate at unbelievable rates, appear and disappear while standing still, and generally show behavior not achievable by human aircraft or rocket craft. In some cases their performance seems to violate known laws of physics. These sightings often take place at night, and most of the objects are reported to be self-luminous. These phenomena are called UFOs (Unidentified FlyingObjects) precisely because their nature is unknown until and unless someone comes along to identify or explain them. The Mexico and West Virginia sightings mentioned above fall into this category.

The Zanesville sightings and photos are in a second category: the observers see, describe, and sometimes make photos or videos of a definite shape, one that could be classified as a spacecraft or at least a manufactured object. These, too, behave in ways that human technology cannot achieve, and they are most often daytime sightings. (Of course there are exceptions. In some cases lighting onboard or on the ground allows observers to see details of the craft even at night.)

The stories of interactions with aliens, the details of the insides of their spacecraft, and the tools for physical exams of abductees represent a third level of involvement of the witnesses. Often these events take place at night, perhaps because the abduction experiences frequently start while abductees are in a dream state, asleep.

These categories apply reasonably well to reports of strange sightings and interactions from all over the world. The modern era of such reports dates back to World War II, when stories of what we now call UFOs began to trickle in. Allied pilots described seeing "foo-fighters," luminous spheres that darted around Allied aircraft while on bombing missions, sometimes keeping station with the bombers and often undergoing extraordinary changes of course and speed. (We will explore this phenomenon in Chapter 7.)

The number of all types of alien phenomena reports grew rapidly after the widely publicized Kenneth Arnold sighting of UFOs in 1947--the sighting from which the term "flying saucers" was coined. The number of reports continues to grow and is now large enough that significant numbers of people have had an experience in one or another of the above categories.

Common elements of UFO sightings include, for example, certain shapes (cigars, saucers, wedges), certain attributes (silent running, for one) and out-of-this-world movements. Many UFOs move but reveal no details of shape or surface texture. Because they are seen by a wide variety of people and mostly for short periods of time in unforeseen circumstances, they may as a group contain a lower incidence of deliberate fraud than the second category--the sightings of what are claimed to be alien spacecraft.

The photos of alien ships produced in this second category are examined critically by specialists inside the UFO community, and are rejected publicly if found wanting (see, for example, UFO Magazine April/May 1999 or almost any recent issue). It is common for the images of spacecraft to be seen against a blank sky. The craft also generally fit into a few common categories of shape.

Because the third category, interaction with aliens, usually is freighted by heavy psychological baggage, the abduction reports may contain a high percentage of honest reporting, though the reality reported may be greatly at odds with common experience.

We will explore each of these three categories, but we will focus most intently on the first two. The reason is that, except for the reports of people passing directly through walls unscathed or of bloodless and incisionless operations (both of which are interesting as physical puzzles--see Chapter 6), the third category of reports generally omits behavior and technology that requires or defies physical explanation (although it may well require psychological explanation). We will mainly delve into the reports of UFO sightings(category 1) and alien spacecraft (category 2), looking carefully at what the accounts imply or say about what happened, trying to show where conventional science leaves off, and then suggesting what kinds of new physics--alien technology if you will--might explain them.

These three categories are not exhaustive, and within them there is much variation as well as commonalities. Sometimes high-tech equipment is involved in the sightings. For example, on August 13, 1956, British radar operators at Bentwaters, England, observed a set of blips with intensities similar to that of an ordinary jet aircraft (before the age of stealth!). The blips were tracked as traveling at speeds of up to 9,000 mph, way above the capability of any maneuvering craft of human origin, then or now....

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: St Martins Pr
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2001
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0312262256
• ISBN 13: 9780312262259
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 211
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar